


Character Development

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-21 03:13:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16568546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: The Doctor feels rather different from her predecessors





	Character Development

The Doctor glances in on her gang in the Tardis control room. They are playing cards and laughing. How quickly they have adapted, she thinks. How well they cope with grief and death. How good they are with each other. She had been certain when she met them that their troubles and their conflicts would follow them onto the Tardis but look at them, all friends, all happy. She can't remember ever having a group of people on board who are so little trouble, so brave, so fond of each other, so willing to go along with everything she suggests. 

Remembering is what she is about, right now, is why she has moved on to the solitude of her diamond room, where she can gaze into the depth of the huge faceted stone and think. She remembers everything, in principle. In practice there is something, some barrier between herself and her previous selves, a barrier that she does not understand.

She reflects on the big decisions that she has made before this body and why they now seem wrong. Some of them were actually wrong, obviously, but generally her previous selves have been moreorless in agreement about what Had To Be Done and was done. Many of them were expedient, many were the lesser of two evils. She cannot imagine making those particular decisions again.

That worries her. If she has rejected expediency, rejected calculation, what has she to replace them? Doing the right thing, she murmurs to herself and she feels the rejection of half a dozen Doctors expressed in everything from disappointment to ridicule. She has nothing else to offer them, not now. 

'What about you,' she asks River. 'What do you think about doing the right thing?' The woman in her head is smiling at her and she feels a pang of loss. That, at least has not changed. 'You're not flexible, like this,' River tells her. 'You're giving yourself no options. Making choices is what you do best.' 

''So why have I changed?'

River shakes her imaginary head. 'Oh my love, I'm only here in your mind. I can't know any more than you do, obviously.'

Why has she changed? She feels that what she is now is the way she should be, but she knows that such feelings can be deceptive. And River- what she has left of River- is concerned. 

She pops out to check up on her people. Yasmin is showing Ryan how to bake muffins. The Doctor is slightly surprised that the Tardis has the necessary ingredients to hand, but it is being remarkably co-operative recently when it comes to creature comforts. They all assure her that they are fine and she should take as much time to think on her own as she needs. Reassured, she returns to the diamond room.

It's new. She's sure it's new. Her last incarnation was comfortable enough with the history of his predecessors. She thinks back on everything she's done and none of that explains anything, so she goes further back, to what he did. To the last things he did. 

She finds it.

Oh my dear idiot, she murmurs. Not that way. How could you have been so stupid?

A command so strong that it had the power to be carried through regeneration, as he'd intended. It had carried further, of course. From him to her, from her to the Tardis, from the Tardis to the people connected to it. 

_Always try to be nice and never fail to be kind_

We have never been kind, she tells him. You least of us. We make the hard choices. We save the world. We do the right thing. How can we do any of that with our hands tied?

So now she is the nice Doctor, with a nice Tardis and a gang of nice people. She has a terrible premonition that she is also the Doctor who is going to fail the ones who need her help, because River is right, she always needs options, better ones than 'be nicer'.

“How do I escape a pre- regeneration compulsion?” she asks the Tardis. It has nothing to offer. She supposes that she should go and tell the others that they are being influenced by a kindness emotion field. They won't mind, of course. They don't mind anything at the moment, being so nice as they are. 

“I'll find a way out of this,” she promises everyone. “Somehow.” But she feels no conviction. Maybe this is what she is now. Nice. It isn't, as far as she can see, an improvement.


End file.
